The level of comfort I have with evolution and other scientific explanations of the world and how it works is pretty high. But I do not call that confidence faith.
"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." (Hebrews 11:1) I do not have faith that gravity is at work. I do not need to hope that gravity shows up and does its thing, nor are its effects unseen. Evolution is the same - its effects are everywhere, and the evidence for evolution is everywhere.
One problem a Biblical faith must address is that a plain reading of the Bible lays out a world that was created 6,000 years ago and suffered a world-wide flood 4,500 years ago. Where all living creatures were within walking distance of the ark. A world where stopping the sun will lengthen the day and where Jesus went up into the sky to reach heaven, and was to return from the sky before his followers died. This is a book with two different creation accounts, two different 10 commandments, and irreconcilable differences in the chronology and activities of Jesus' life on earth.
These things are simply true about the Bible, and just like the fact of evolution, should in all honesty be faced. Some biblical literalists tell us that rather than face these facts, the facts should be denied, and if they can't be denied, that a Christian is supposed to make a virtue of believing things that are obviously not true (they call this faith - compare this with Hebrews 11:1 above, and you'll see that this is an innovation, and shares little with the notion of Biblical faith).
As a personal religion, I am OK with that (well, it makes me uncomfortable, but we all believe things that aren't true). I put these beliefs in the same category as astrology and palm reading.
What has me concerned is that there are now enough of these folks who believe that ignorance is a virtue that they are being successful in rolling back confidence in science. Educators are being fired for doing their jobs, teachers are being pressured to skip over the teaching of evolution, and pastors are pandering to this "appearance of godliness" by blaming the teaching of evolution for the world's ills.
It is important to live in the light as much as possible, in part because we risk making grave errors when we base our public and private lives on a lie. It is difficult work to figure out how to read the Bible in light of what we have learned about the natural world. But just like we managed to adjust our thinking about the Bible to Galileo's revelations, we can adjust to reading the Bible in light of what we've learned about the world via evolution and quantum mechanics.
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3 comments:
All scientific theories are provisional, and based on the presupposition that a mindlessly evolved organic brain is capable of understanding the true nature of reality.
Provisional does not mean arbitrary, or without foundation. To say that humans are limited in their perception, and bound by logic to the possibility or error does not mean that we can know nothing of the world around us.
Mindless evolved organic brains are not a precondition of science. Most Western scientists were Christians, and a significant percent (relatively unchanged in the last one hundred years) still are.
Further, if we are somehow limited in such a way as we cannot perceive reality, then revelation offers no answer - we have to take revelation on faith, without any certainty that we have received a true revelation, or that we have understood that revelation correctly. The number of world regions claiming divine revelation, and the wide variety of sects, denominations and interpretations within religions attest to this difficulty.
I see no basis for holding that Biblical faith requires that we believe things that have been demonstrated to be false. We all use what we know about the world to help us understand our faith. Just because we don't like where the road is going is no reason to give up on the truth.
You are equivocating on "faith" and "confidence".
You have plenty of faith in science.
Stop kidding yourself.
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